VCTF-Armageddon

Description
Well here's a map with a fair few contradictions.

From the design angle this map checks most of the boxes. The terrain is convincing, the damaged buildings and roads all certainly look good and look the part, and though the few building interiors are light on the aesthetics (to put it politely) they also fit in well enough. The layout is fair enough for what you'd expect in a CTF/VCTF map, mostly symmetrical layouts linked by the centerpoint. The subway tunnels with the crater breaking to open ground halfway across was an interesting play on the old trope of CTF maps having convenient unsecured passages into each base, and for the defensive player these passages are likely the best place to set up shop as the above ground route is too open to reach the flag without having to shoot through the entire team.

On the other hand there are a few issues which mean it doesn't feel as good to play, at least as far as this gamer's concerned. The first flaw is almost immediately noticeable - the spawnpoints are in each team's sniper nest overlooking the flag, however since exiting requires jumping down a long shaft there's no way to leave without losing most of your HP. So quite likely the map will result in one-hit kills and races for the health pickups.

Another concern is the major mismatch in vehicle distributions. The red team have a Hellbender and SPMA right in their base, and three more Hellbenders and a Goliath in a parking lot nearby. The only vehicles available for the blue team are three Scorpions stashed in the same parking lot as the red's Goliath. Ouch. However as a flipside each team also has a passage with a big keg o'health, and while the red team's is blocked off by an invisible wall, the blues can use theirs as a shortcut to capitalize on their speed (provided they could get a Scorpion to safety to begin with). I still can't help but feel that this map was engineered so that the blue team had no chance of victory, but who knows.

On the whole it's a nice, pretty well-built map that's kind of let down by the balancing issues, so for that reason I can't see it getting much online usage, and it's useless for botmatch since the blue team bots appear to have no routing data whereas the red bots do. On the other hand if you like winning hopeless battles the blue team may be the place for you in this map.

~Mikouen